The ubiquitous plastic bottle so far thought to be a clean and safe container for water and other liquids can be harmful to the health of the users, according to a government sponsored study.

The Government , however, has kept the study conducted by the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune under wraps. Environmentalists are sore at the Government for keeping the study a secret as its findings directly affect the public, especially the school children with form the majority users of plastic water bottle.

In the study sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology, researchers picked up 10 plastic water bottles of different popular brands available in the market. The water contained in these bottles was put through different tests to assess its quality.

The results were starting. The quality of water contained in nine of the 10 bottles fell below the potable water standards set by the Bureau of Indian Standards. Only on e bottle matched the standards.

Mr A.K. Roy, an environmentalist with the people’s Scientific Institute, Dehradun who revealed these facts at a workshop on pollution monitoring organised by the World Wide Fund For Nature, India, said the main reason for the harmful effects of the plastic water bottle was that majority of these bottles were made of recycled plastic.

“The more you recycle the plastic, the more it becomes brittle an d prone to cracks which will eventually help bacteria to enter the water or other liquids in plastic bottles,” explained Mr. Roy.

He said plastic contains certain physical as well as chemical impurities and when water was stored in a plastic container, the water which was a powerful absorbant drew those impurities which could be harmful to the health.

ECOLOGICAL MYTHS :  Environmentalists point out that the Government has also kept the results of two similar studies, one on eucalyptus & another on the smokeless  ‘chulhas’ secret simply because they exploded the myths. Scientific experiments, for instance, have disproved the widely held notion that eucalyptus does not use up more ground water than other tree species.

In another significant study on smokeless chulhas  conducted by the Centre for Rural Development, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, researchers found these chulhas were neither more fuel efficient nor less polluting than the open fire. “But none of these research studies have been published”, said Mr. Roy, “because the results go against the government policies”.

Environmentalists say that as the environment keeps getting more polluted and the pollutants more dangerous, facts about them were being hidden from the public. People should have access to detailed but simpler information about pollution and environment which affects them directly and access to inexpensive devices to test and monitor pollutants, they suggest.

The Hindustan Times